How ET-Forex collects and ranks rates

Every figure on ET-Forex is read from an exchange rate board an Ethiopian bank publishes itself, on its own website or channels. The bank is named against every number. Nothing is estimated, averaged into a single “Ethiopian rate”, or taken from a mid-market feed.

ET-Forex does not collect, quote or estimate parallel (black market) rates. The black market explainer covers why.

Each tracked bank’s board is re-read automatically several times a day, and pages refresh within minutes of a change. Most Ethiopian banks reprice once per business day, in the morning.

Two dates are kept for every bank, because they answer different questions:

• Trading day— the day the bank’s figures are for. This only moves when the bank publishes a new board.
• Last read— when ET-Forex last checked the board. This moves on every read, even when the figures have not changed.

A bank whose newest board belongs to an earlier trading day than the rest of the market is marked stale. Its figures stay visible, dated, because they are still what the bank last said. But they are ranked after every current bank however good the number looks, and they are left out of the best-rate cards, the converter and the market statistics. A rate from last week is not one anybody can walk into a branch and get.

A stale bank’s own page says so in its title and opening line, and names the trading day its figures belong to rather than calling them today’s.

Every bank publishes four figures per currency, and each one answers a different question. Each column is ranked on its own:

• Cash buying— what the bank pays you for foreign banknotes. Highest is best.
• Cash selling— what the bank charges you for foreign banknotes. Lowest is best.
• Transactional buying— what the bank pays for non-cash foreign currency: a remittance credited to an account, a wire received. Highest is best.
• Transactional selling— what the bank charges for non-cash foreign currency: an outgoing wire, an import payment. Lowest is best.

The best figure in each column usually comes from a different bank. That is real dispersion between banks, not an error, and it is why the site shows four best rates rather than one.

Rankings are by published figure and nothing else. Sponsorship and partnerships never change the order, the comparison, or a number on the board; the sponsorship policy sets out the line.

Banks occasionally publish a figure that cannot be right: a column shifted, a unit error, a board half-updated. Two checks keep those figures from becoming the site’s loudest claim.

• Impossible boards— a bank always charges more for a currency than it pays for it. A board whose selling rate is at or below its own buying rate, for the same rate type, is treated as a publishing error.
• Off-market quotes — a quote more than 15% from the median of every current bank is treated as suspect. Ethiopian banks price within a few percent of each other, so a gap that size is the signature of a unit or column error rather than a bargain.

Quotes caught by either check are left out of the best-rate cards, the converter, the market statistics, page descriptions and llms.txt. They are never hidden: the rate tables show every bank’s published figures exactly as they were posted, because the point of this site is to show what banks actually said.

The converter picks the best current bank for the direction and rate type you choose, using the same filters as the best-rate cards, and names that bank alongside the result. The arithmetic is done on the ET-Forex API, which holds rates as exact decimals. Where a “better than the weakest board” figure is shown, both ends come from banks publishing on the same trading day.

Charts show the best market buying and selling rate per day over the last 90days. A bank’s up or down arrow compares its figure with that same bank’s previous publication; it is not a comparison with other banks.

The same data is available through the developer API.

A published board is set centrally and should apply at every branch, but a branch may not hold enough foreign cash for a large exchange, fees may apply on top of the rate, and larger transactions may need identification and supporting documents. Confirm with the bank before acting. The Terms of Service set out the full disclaimer.

If a figure here does not match a bank’s own board, tell us at info@et-forex.com or through the contact page. A mismatch is usually a board that moved since our last read or a bank that changed its page layout, and both are fixed the same day we hear about them.